There Is a Rogue Group of Stars Behaving Very Suspiciously in the Milky Way's Disk

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | September 27, 2018 01:00pm ET

The Milky Way has a violent past. When it isn't swallowing renegade sausage galaxies, it seems to be waging endless games of interstellar tug-of-war with its nearest galactic neighbors — and not always winning. According to a new study published Sept. 19 in the journal Nature, one such encounter ended with a cosmic wound to the Milky Way's disk that still hasn't fully healed, 300 million years later.

That wound, researchers say, is visible in a cluster of several million stars that are not behaving as they should be. While still rotating around the Milky Way's galactic center, these rogue stars also orbit around one another in a wobbly, spiral pattern that has only become more tangled over the past eon. [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

"We have observed shapes. [of star clusters] with different morphologies, such as a spiral similar to a snail's shell," lead study author Teresa Antoja, a researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) at the University of Barcelona,said in a statement. "These substructures allow us to conclude that the disk of our galaxy suffered an important gravitational disturbance."

Antoja and her colleagues spied the signs of this cosmic battle scar while studying the treasure map of star data shared earlier this year by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. Gaia provided scientists with the most detailed picture of our galaxy yet, offering the precise locations and velocities of more than 1.7 billion stars in the Milky Way. Antoja and her team noticed that one cluster of stars in the galactic disk swirled in a pattern distinct from that of its interstellar neighbors, and the researchers suspected some intergalactic mischief was afoot.

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https://www.livescience.com/63698-milky-way-spiral-wobble.html?utm_source=notification

[Fullduplexxx]

1. Cool stuff thanks

[keithbvadu2]

2. "300 million years later. "

Such great amounts of time and distance and energy.

I'm going to have to take their word for it and accept it just as if it was science fiction.

It's beyond my ken and I accept that fact.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Galactic whirlpools...

Check out 'visualisation' at the Gaia archive here: https://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/